Wall Street Wakes Up to 3D Printing, Predicts Massive Growth

By Christopher Mims

Wall Street is starting to wake up to the potential of 3D printing. This morning Citi analyst Kenneth Wong released a bullish note projecting that the market for 3D printing and related services will triple by 2018, citing the leading companies in this area, Stratasys and 3D Systems. (Granted, such rapid growth is possible partly because the industry is still tiny, just $1.7 billion in 2011, with the market for 3D printed parts accounting for about half of that.)

Wong attributes future growth to such mouthfuls as “broader adoption across more upstream production applications and the consumer end market,” and “increased utilization of existing systems as customers start to extend use case beyond small batch digital manufacturing,” but here’s what that means in plain English.

Once used mostly for prototyping, 3D printed parts are more than ever making it into finished products, including demanding applications like rocket engines.

One thing to be careful about when analyzing the potential of 3D printing is hype—especially of the “3D printing will replace conventional manufacturing” variety. While 3D printing allows “mass customization,” at this point there are lots of things that the technology isn’t good for. There are also applications of 3D printing that might never make it out of the lab, but are interesting to think about, like 3D-printed food.

One sign of maturity in the 3D printing space is that mergers and acquisitions are starting to happen, notably the acquisition by Stratasys, the leading maker of industrial 3D printers, of Makerbot, the leading producer of 3D printers for hobbyists. Companies in this space may need to get big or at least stay innovative in order to survive, since a flood of cheap 3D printers from China is on its way.